Computer Science Student, Developer, Gamer

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Tag Archives: Sweepy

Finally Robocleaner is now available for download on the Windows Phone marketplace. Check it out, feedback welcome. There’s a “try” option to play the first 3 levels on each mode for free and the Online Leaderboards function in the trial mode too.

As my first solo title that I’ve worked on it was a great learning process and gave me a good idea how tough it must be being a full-time indie developer, especially if your a one-man team doing design, coding, graphics and sound. It’s certainly encouraged me to continue and it’s a shame that XNA is pretty much being dropped in WP8 since a lot of the XNA specific skills I’ve picked up may not be much use in the future (without Monogame at least).

My aim for the next couple of semesters at Uni with time permitting, is to work on more mobile game titles, likely simpler ones (Shear Carnage) with less physics and AI coding. One thing I learned is that just because you have a cool path-finding or a realistic wall bounce algorithm, it may be technically impressive but it really doesn’t impact the game overall and it’s better probably to make games where more complex mechanics aren’t required to make the game fun. I do enjoy doing AI and the physics side of things but with mobile games, it’s better to get the game done ASAP and out on the market so people can have fun playing it. Next time I’ll be aiming to get two games released in the time it took me to make Robocleaner!

I thought I’d finally get around to making a post on my blog and specifically concerning the thing that has taken up the majority of my time over the past week or so. Sweepy Cleaner!

This is a coursework project we had been assigned as part of the the Hull University Computer Science degree. We were given a spec and tasked with making a game plus extras via C# and XNA 4.0.

I decided I wanted to make as polished a game as I could that stuck pretty tightly to the design specification, but still add a decent amount of extras here and there. In the end I’m pleased with the finished product and really enjoyed making the game.

The toughest aspect of the project was the AI path-finding that I wanted to put in the game so that in “attract mode” it guided itself around the furniture and collected dust of it’s own accord. This sounds simple but in reality it was the trickiest bit of programming I’ve probably done and let’s just say I won’t be bitching about dodgy path-finding in AAA games any time soon. I may actually make a separate post on this and include a dissection of the code I came up with. I decided to initially look into an A* algorithm but I wasn’t sure how best to apply that to a game where things don’t move along a grid. So I decided to use static waypoint nodes that I manually placed around the level and then added them to a list, sorting them based on distance from each waypoint to the nearest dust to the hoover. I spent a long time trying to perfect it and although still not perfect, (I had to use at least one workaround) it performs convincingly enough with no furniture collisions and I’m very happy with it. I could later adapt it to make a “vs” mode where you have to race the AI hoover to collect the dust.

There’s only 3 levels in the game, I’ll hopefully add more before I get it on the Windows Marketplace.

Fingers crossed that my demo goes ok next Wednesday!

Here’s the artwork I did for the title screen, it does makes me think a 3D version of Sweepy Cleaner could be pretty fun!